Prescription drugs generally have an appointed time-point (in the present application, a term “time-point” means “date and time”) when the drugs are to be dispensed or delivered to a patient, so that they are prepared to meet the appointed time-point. In a tablet filling instrument which dispenses tablets into a vial in accordance with prescription data and discharges the vial filled with the tablets in an outlet, the vial filled with the tablets is held in the outlet until being taken out by an operator. A vial filled with tablets having a quickly-impending appointed time-point may not be discharged in the outlet if all of a plurality of outlets are occupied by other vials. That forces patients who come for receiving drugs at the appointed time-point into waiting.
Conventionally, the below-identified patent document 1 discloses a dispensing system for reducing the patient's waiting time as a whole by displaying a progress of work of a dispensing instrument in a display to show an operator a status of dispensing operations so as to adjust schedules of the dispensing operations carried out by the instrument. The below-identified patent document 2 discloses an audit information processing system for reducing the patient's waiting time by adding a priority flag to an urgent audit data to be rearranged and ranked higher so as to audit the data by priority.
The systems described in the above-mentioned patent documents may not reduce the patient's waiting time if prepared drugs are not discharged appropriately by the dispensing instruments, even though a schedule or the order of audition is artificially adjusted through displays of a progress of work of the instrument or a degree of urgency of audit data.
Patent Document 1: JP 6-9600 B
Patent Document 2: JP 2002-366657 A